More detective novels

Czarniawska has written on detective stories and research. So did Thorpe and Moscarola. Isn't research like a detective story? You find something out by induction or deduction or abduction, and then you have to write it as an interesting tale.

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Czarniawska, B. (1999) 'Management She Wrote: Organization Studies and Detective Stories', Studies in Cultures, Organizations & Societies, 5 (1), pp. 13-41. 490
Thorpe, R. and Moscarola, J. (1991) 'Detecting Your Research Strategy', Management Learning, 22 (2), pp. 127-133. 1019

Detective novels and writing social science

I've been reading stuff relating to qualitative methods, especially social constructionist and enjoying reading this small book from Czarniawska. She writes about other than the traditional interview, stuff like shadowing (both people and objects), doing diary studies and observant participation. She has written heaps and heaps of stuff - look at this list. No wonder she's an honorary academic at Copenhagen and Gothenburg.

She's interested in:

• organisational studies
• constructionism
• narratology

In Shadowing (2001), she describes her embarrassment when following an FD in Warsaw she is told that the FD is busy or "these matters are not intended for the ear of strangers". So she knows the practical difficulties of research.

The last section of the book is about writing up research and it is here that she compares writing about research with detective fiction. I hadn't seen the genres as similar, but I enjoy detective novels, like Dexter's Morse, and P.D James' Dalgleish, or Sara Paretsky's VI Warshawski. Czarniawska compares approaches:

• inductive
• deductive
• abductive

which were mentioned in the doctoral training workshop last autumn, and on the B852 business research methods in a paper by Thorpe & Moscarola. Different detectives have different approaches, as do researchers. When it comes to reporting findings convention might be flouted and she gives an example of chapter headings, some taking a dramaturgical approach and others framing activity as cyclical in character. She illustrates the influence on her own reports.

She also writes about people using multimedia, like cameras and videos. I want to use a camera to record where people meet and work, but think video will be too much intrusion, especially in the public sector. What clues will photos add that other methods would miss?

And then, wouldn't it be fun to be able write a detective story from the research data!

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Czarniawska, B. (2001) Shadowing: and other techniques for doing field work in modern societies. 815

Theories

Last week's supervision indicated that I need to have a theory to model my stuff on. I'd mentioned someone else's use of agency theory, but am also looking at actor-network theory because Czarniawska talks about it being a constructionist theory.

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Czarniawska, B. (2001) Shadowing: and other techniques for doing field work in modern societies.

Theoretical framework

Choosing a methodology for a research project involves choosing appropriate methods, depending on what access is possible and how the researcher is thinking. The research process is informed by the researcher’s theoretical perspective, which is a philosophical stance. The theoretical perspective is itself informed by the epistemology and ontology. So the research process has four elements that inform one another: epistemology, theoretical perspective, methodology and methods (Crotty, 1998).

What the constructionist approach is
Constructionism is the idea that there is no objective truth but that we all construct our own reality, meaning is constructed and different people construct meaning in different ways. People need to have mechanisms for understanding what each of them is doing and need rich forms of conversations that are adequate to dealing with the complexity of social relationships so it’s sense making.

(Guba & Lincoln refer to the constructivist paradigm (Guba and Lincoln, 1989))

Why use the constructionist approach here
Clients and consultants can construct each others roles and clients are actors or agents who shape each others standing of what they do. Schein categorises those roles and so does Bovens.

Disadvantages of the constructionist approach
Czarniawska warns of the difficulties of employing the constructionist stance because the logic of representation is conventionally used between researchers but the medium of everyday organisational life is the logic of practice so there can be difficulties of communication between researchers and managers (Czarniawska, 2001).

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Crotty, M. (1998) 'Introduction: the research process'. The foundations of social research: meaning and perspective in the research process, Sage, London.
Czarniawska, B. (2001) 'Is it Possible to Be a Constructionist Consultant?' Management Learning, 32 (2), pp. 253.
Guba, E. G. and Lincoln, Y. S. (1989) Fourth Generation Evaluation, Sage.

Constructing consultancy

I'm a bit confused by Czarniawska's paper [1]. She describes attempts to communicate between a business practitioner and a researcher (herself) as using two different logics. I'd have said that they were talking at cross purposes Czarniawska describes it in terms of logics and describes these logics. Now up to now, for me, logic is logic is logic – like one logic and no variations. But she describes:

• logic of representation
• logic of practice
• logic of theory

Logic of theory claims to use formal logic and has criteria of truths – sounds like what I understood to be logic – mathematical logic
Logic of practice is concrete, uses incomplete narrative and tacit knowledge – sounds like common sense to me.
Logic of representation is abstract, uses rhetoric and stylised narrative – sounds like a form of story telling.

I think Czarniawska might be saying the same thing as Seidl and Mohe, but using different theories. They said consultants and their clients couldn't communicate because they each work in their own system and the communication got distorted (perturbed) in transmission.

I have a recollection of someone (Fincham?) writing about the different discourses that clients and consultants use. I must find and check if that is another way of explaining talking at cross purposes.

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[1] Czarniawska, B. (2001) Is it possible to be a constructionist consultant? Management Learning, 32 (2), pp253
[2] Seidl, D., Mohe, M., (2007) The consultant-client relationship: a systems-theoretical perspective. Available from http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/